Businesses providing products or services have traditionally found it useful to advertise. In order for advertising to be effective, an advertisement must contain information such as available products or services, prices and vendor locations. Further, this information must be conveyed to interested potential customers.
In the past, promotion of products or services has been accomplished using techniques including catalog sales, vendor directories, telemarketing, direct mail and radio, television and newspaper advertising. These techniques have certain disadvantages in both cost and effectiveness.
Recently, computerized promotion has been added to the list of advertising techniques. A system providing computerized promotion may be placed in a common area of a shopping mall or hotel lobby to provide patrons information regarding local vendors.
The typical computerized promotion system is text-based, menu driven and primarily operates as a directory to vendors. A user must select from a classification menu to identify the desired type of vendor. A user must then select from a vendor list to obtain information on the desired vendor.
While the prior art methods and systems provide promotional information to users, the prior art has significant shortcomings. A first shortcoming is that users are provided little opportunity to interact with the promotional presentation. A user must often wait until a presentation is finished to make a new selection. In instances where the method supports user interruption of a presentation, the user must navigate through a text-based menu system to select a new presentation.
A second shortcoming is that the selection mechanisms and user interfaces are not intuitive. Users must understand the concepts of hierarchical menu systems to best utilize the prior art computerized promotional methods and systems.
Another shortcoming is that the prior art menu driven promotional methods and systems require a user to spend a large percentage of time operating the system when compared to the time spent viewing the promotional material.
Yet another shortcoming is that a limited amount of information is presented to the user at one time. Other art areas, such as the field of television receivers having picture-in-picture capability, have addressed this problem by providing multiple display areas on a television screen.
U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,914,516 and 5,194,954 of Duffield relate to channel sampling circuits for scanning broadcasts on multiple television channels. These circuits display freeze-frames received from various television channels.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,161,012 of Choi discloses a multi-screen generating circuit capable of displaying on a main screen a plurality of multi-screens. The circuit provides the capability of selecting the type of multi-screens regardless of the number of broadcasting channels.
Although the prior art in other areas provides more information on a single screen than current advertising stations, the picture-in-picture systems described are not adapted for use in computerized advertising stations.